there’s more than shown here and it’s more than just these users too 😭
if you find the thread don’t piss in the popcorn (brigade) but also please maybe don’t bring it back here i don’t want 400 notifications of entry level “is almond milk milk” vegan discourse
“I’ve been sober all day.” is my new comeback when someone insults my intelligence in an argument.
I like how the wording may imply that being sober that particular day might be in contrast to other days.
I had to ban someone because they were arguing about whether tumblr prose about physics and love was scientifically rigorous and after arguing for a chain of like 20 comments they reported the other person and started calling me names when I told them the entire argument was dumb. They then took it to the instances’ main / meta forum to publically complain about and got pretty universally torn apart by both the instance moderators and several fascinated rubberneckers. They picked a molehill and just absolutely fought to the death on it for some inscrutable reason.
I’ve mentioned it a couple times in various meta comments on the topic of moderation less because it particularly bothers me but mostly just because it is sort of living rent free in my head in the same way as when you see someone eating an entire lobster dinner complete with metal cutlery and a cloth napkin at the bus stop. Just… huh. That person is well and truly marching to the beat of their own drum and it certainly seems to be bringing them joy but… huh.
The expression on that dude’s face was very reminiscent of my face when trying to read through the original offending comment chain.
Bringing this full circle, it reminds me of a time I saw an entire long Reddit chain nuked by a mod who was astounded that people indulged the “Europeans never ate beans before Columbus and if you call that thing that originally came from Eurasia a bean, you’re wrong” guy for so long.
Transcribing the conversation here:
Recessa, ↑4 ↓1: That’s completely idiotic, milk exist because there’s demand for it.
commie, ↑1 ↓4: I think you understand that milk is produced as part of the mammalian reproductive cycle. can you describe the causal steps between demanding milk and it’s production?
friendlymessage, ↑3 ↓2: Do you think dairy cattle just randomly spawns on the planetary surface?
commie, ↑1 ↓3: do you think there’s a direct causal link between drinking milk and more being produced?
friendlymessage, ↑3: Are you fucking with me?
commie, ↑2 ↓3: no. I’m trying to illustrate that markets are not governed by natural law; they are populated by irrational actors.
friendlymessage, ↑2 ↓1: Yeah, but they’re not as irrational as you are and producing milk costs money. If there’s no market, they will stop because they are not fuckin lunatics and they don’t have infinite resources
commie, ↑2 ↓2: milk was farmed before markets existed. there is no reason to believe that will ever stop.
friendlymessage, ↑3 ↓1: That… must be the dumbest discussion I’ve had in a while. Please read through your comments tomorrow when you’re sober
commie, ↑1 ↓1: I’ve been sober all day.
friendlymessage, ↑1: Okay, whatever you say
commie, ↑1 ↓2: everything I’ve said is true. you’re objecting to reality, and being pretty shitty about it to me.
friendlymessage, ↑2: No, you’re just making a no sensical argument at all. Milk was farmed from dairy cattle because it was consumed by humans. It’s simple supply and demand. There is no rational argument at all that if mankind stopped consuming milk, it would still be farmed. Why would any farmer go through the effort to upkeep cows and keep them impregnanted to make them produce milk if they cannot trade it or won’t consume it? Yes, humans have free will but they won’t produce stuff with very high effort just for fun. Except maybe very sick minds that just enjoy animal cruelty. And you won’t elaborate what your actual point is anyway.
Also, not that it matters, but you’re arguing that dairy farming existed before the market is simply wrong. There has been trade between human civilizations long before we started domesticating animals.
There’s a common misunderstanding among a lot of .ml folks that markets are a capitalist thing and if you just don’t call them that then they don’t exist.
Appreciate it but your comment got auto corrected on two instances of “causal” to “casual” by commie.
Commie thinks that milk is just a byproduct of cows existing. Friendlymessage correctly points out that you need to repeatedly get cows pregnant, take away their calves, and feed them to produce milk and nobody would do it if there wasn’t a market demand. In essence, there’s zero situation where milk can be ethically vegan if that’s your ethical framework.
I think commie begins saying that milk is naturally produced during the normal birthing of young. Then gets side tracked by the commercial aspect of milk as a product. Namely, no demand, no product. I could be wrong…
Ah yeah, I’ve had an interaction with that anti-vegan user before, and let me tell ya, if you want to speedrun vegan bingo… ideal discussion partner right there.
politely raises hand
While I think factory farming is abhorrent, I find the most compelling reasons to eat plant-based to be the environmental ones. Therefore, I think “I only eat a little bit of meat” is actually a huge positive step someone can take. If your primary concern regarding meat is the cruelty of taking the life of another animal, that’s completely valid, but compared to the others, that square just feels out of place.
The “Vegans are loud and annoying” crowd are more loud and annoying than actual vegans in my personal experience.
Often when society had an extreme default position on a topic, its defenders sound batshit insane.
See:
- Gay and trans rights
- Reproductive rights
- Veganism
- Unregulated capitalism
- Homelessness
But you probably won’t get called a murderer 20 seconds into the discussion though.
You’d be surprised. Both “The farming of your plants kills more animals than livestock raising” and “veganism is genocide because they’ll stop breeding the animals if we stop eating them” unironocally come up almost instantly when I talk about it and I’m not even quite vegan, I just avoid animal products because of allergies to a lot of them…
The happy animals one is hilarious. I would have no problem with someone eating me after I died and I sure as shit am not happy
Ah yes. That one is the one where every interlocutor happens to only eat meat “from their uncles farm with 3 cows on 40 acres of pasture, where they’re hand-scrubbed by cherubs while eating figs.”
Aw man I fucked that up. My uncle has 40 cows on 3 acres that get hand scrubbed by figs while eating cherubs.
I don’t care about my corpse after I’m dead, but I do somewhat disagree with getting killed.
It took me a whole 24 hours to realise that the person having a weird, inconsistent, fact-swerving argument with me (about my assertion that most male cattle are killed young for meat) was the original one from the screenshot!
My last time talking to them, they were arguing that the use of the word “exploitation” in the vegan society’s definition of veganism simply meant “use” because that’s a thesaurus entry for exploitation. When their argument breaks down they go full on “words are just invented”.
I’m not even sure if that bingo is supposed to be pro-vegan or anti-vegan …
When I was a young vegling, I spent some time doing “outreach” on r/DebateAVegan (air quotes because it often felt about as impactful as having a wank), and you’d see those bingo arguments being used earnestly ALL THE TIME.
I actually did occasionally get some fairly novel and thought provoking stuff, from time to time, but mostly it was explaining the basics of biology or econ to people like in OP’s example.
Just curious, does a community like that exist here on lemmy? I do have some questions that aren’t answered by the vegan bingo and would love to ask someone, but going straight to !vegan@lemmy.ml feels kinda intrusive
Unequivocally, yes you are, and at that, you’re one of the most agonizingly stubborn and disinformed ones I’ve ever talked to.
Edit: Sharing this conversation here in the context of them being banned from /c/vegan so users can understand how completely full of shit this user is (yes, their actual argument they started at /c/vegan is that vegans starting from a position of “humans have rights” is a flawed position to start from and thus invalidates their argument for veganism):
Edit 2: Oh, and they have this thing where they like to reply to a single comment with several comments while claiming it’s because they “don’t want to engage in a Gish gallop” (paraphrased), meanwhile facilitating a Gish gallop by making an unfollowable branching tree of comments.
your link shows the same as the op thread: I’m primarily interested in a factual, scientifically accurate discussion.
